Will Grigg?s Liberty Minute

February 13, 2008

It has been nearly twenty years since the Berlin Wall was breached and the Soviet Empire began its terminal collapse. The economic costs Moscow?s global empire proved to be unsustainable.

Rather than allowing our country to revert to its natural status as a commercial republic, our rulers have emulated the Soviets by seeking to build a global empire at a cost of thousands of lives and trillions of dollars.

To pay for Washington?s imperial commitments while masking their true cost to our standard of living, the Federal Reserve poured huge sums of inflated dollars into the global economy.

Now, the inevitable reckoning day has arrived. National Intelligence Director Dennis Blair reports that the collapse of our financial system and resulting economic crisis is now the greatest threat to our national security ? indeed, to our very way of life.

But such is always the price of empire.

Let us take back the liberty wherewith Christ has made us free.

Will Grigg?s Liberty Minute

February 12, 2009

Newsweek?s February 16 cover story triumphantly announces: ?We Are All Socialists Now.? According to the publication: ?Whether we want to admit it or not ? the America of 2009 is moving toward a modern European state.?

The magazine points out that ?the U.S. government has already ? effectively nationalized the banking and mortgage industries?. [I]t was ? under a conservative GOP administration that we enacted the largest expansion of the welfare state in 30 years: prescription drugs for the elderly.? Republican-led state governments are likewise clamoring for ?stimulus? funding from Washington.

While all of this is true, Newsweek overplays its hand by insisting that there is no choice but to accept the emergence of a full-blown American socialist state. The impending bankruptcy of the government will re-shuffle the political deck thoroughly, and provide ample opportunity for defenders of free market capitalism to re-build our society on a more rational basis.

Let us take back the liberty wherewith Christ has made us free.

Justus Samuel Grigg

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Will Grigg?s Liberty Minute

February 11, 2009

Ethiopian-born Binyam Mohammed is one of the few detainees grateful to be confined at Guantanamo Bay. Gitmo holds few horrors for Mohammed after the unspeakable torture he suffered elsewhere at the hands of US subcontractors.

Mohammed, a legal resident of Great Britain, was kidnapped by the CIA and sent to Morocco. There he was chained to a wall, forcibly drugged with heroin, and routinely beaten. The worst torment involved the use of razor-sharp scalpels to inflict a series of small but painful incisions all over his body, including his genitals. Witnesses have seen the wounds on his back and chest.

A British government inquiry into Mohammed?s treatment has been stymied by Washington, which threatens to withhold counter-terrorism intelligence if additional evidence of torture is made public.

Any government that uses gangster methods to conceal torture and other crimes is worthy of being called a terrorist regime.

Let us take back the liberty wherewith Christ has made us free.

Will Grigg?s Liberty Minute

February 10, 2009

With the federal government preparing to run up trillion-dollar annual budget deficits, the foreign creditors who have propped up Washington appear to be surfeited on its bad debt.

Piling new trillions of debt atop existing trillions of debt will do nothing but destroy the dollar and wipe out the middle class. Essayist Thomas Eddlem proposes an international grassroots movement to ?shut off the debt spigot by cutting up the [federal] credit card.?

Specifically, he wants to create a viral campaign organized around the theme: ?Don?t Buy Bad Federal Debt!? This would mean not buying T-Bills, Savings Bonds, or any other government securities, selling the ones people already own, and encouraging foreign investors to do likewise.

Eddlem points out that the market for federal debt is already saturated. A movement by US citizens to dump federal debt instruments could resonate with creditors who are already prepared to cut off Washington?s tab.

Let us take back the liberty wherewith Christ has made us free.

Will Grigg?s Liberty Minute

Feburary 9, 2009

Exactly a century ago today, Congress passed the Opium Exclusion Act, the Opium Exclusion Act, thereby inaugurating the war on drugs. That campaign, which for 13 years included alcohol prohibition, has been the longest war in our nation?s history.

Prior to that time, Americans could purchase and use any drug at their local pharmacy. Cocaine was advertised as a topical analgesic in family magazines and included as an ingredient in Coca-Cola.

This did not lead to widespread drug addiction: According to the National Institute on Drug Abuse, addiction rates during that period never rose above one-half of a percent of the population. Following a century of drug prohibition, an estimated four percent of the population struggles with addiction.

The War on Drugs has militarized law enforcement, gutted the Bill of Rights, and contributed to the breakdown of social order in countries from Colombia to Mexico. One century of such foolishness is enough.

Let us take back the liberty wherewith Christ has made us free.

Will Grigg?s Liberty Minute

February 6, 2009

The state of California has the world?s eighth-largest economy. It is broke. Unlike the Federal Government, however, California cannot print its own fiat currency.

As former Treasury Department official Paul Craig Roberts points out, this means that the state government in Sacramento will start issuing IOUs. Tax refunds, student aid, and various welfare programs will distribute the IOUs as soon as the state government can persuade banks to accept them as deposits.

California has long been a national trend-setter. Forty-five other states face severe and deepening fiscal emergencies and will almost certainly confront the same problems California now faces.

The unfolding global depression has brought protesters to the streets in Iceland, Russia, and various European Union countries. As the collapse accelerates we?ll see street turmoil here in the U.S. as well.

We must prepare ? financially, materially, and spiritually ? for the upheavals to come, and stand fast in demanding the restoration of the liberty wherewith Christ has made us free.

Will Grigg?s Liberty Minute

February 5, 2009

Recently in Oakland, California, a police officer named Johannes Mehserle shot and killed Oscar Grant while the unresisting young man was lying handcuffed, face-down on the floor, surrounded by police.

This killing was witnessed by dozens of horrified people. Several of them captured the incident with cellphone cameras.
Significantly, only seconds elapsed after the shooting before police fanned out and attempted to confiscate the cameras; in several instances they chased witnesses into a nearby train demanding that the cameras be surrendered.

Police often seek to confiscate cameras when incidents of brutality occur. A bill sponsored by New York Republican Congressman Pete King would make this easier by requiring cell phones to make a clicking noise whenever they are in use. However, that bill would not change the fact that Police have no legal right to confiscate cell phones or other cameras to cover up their own criminal conduct.

Let us take back the liberty wherewith Christ has made us free.

Will Grigg?s Liberty Minute

February 4, 2009

A generation ago, some of the most militant black activists condemned the detestable practice of government-abetted child slaughter as a form of lethal racism.

In 1970, for example, the leadership of the Black Panther militia predicted that blacks would be targeted by the abortion industry. A few years later, a young inner city preacher named Jesse Jackson condemned abortion as a genocidal assault on black children and a symptom of America?s descent into a society akin to Sodom and Gomorrah.

Other prominent black leaders who condemned abortion were Dick Gregory and H. Rap Brown.

Those critiques proved to be prescient.

Tom Bethell of The American Spectator points out that nearly sixty percent of the abortions committed each year destroy non-white babies. And we now have a black president whose first actions in office included restoring unconstitutional federal funding for the abortion industry?s assault on non-white children abroad.

Let us take back the liberty wherewith Christ has made us free.

Will Grigg?s Liberty Minute

February 3, 2009

Speaking to a rapturous campaign audience in Oregon last year, then-Senator Obama notoriously berated fellow Americans for our environmentally irresponsible extravagance.

"We can't drive our SUVs and eat as much as we want and keep our homes on 72 degrees at all times ... and then just expect that other countries are going to say ?OK,?? pontificated the candidate.

Obama promised to change America. Within the first week of his term, Obama did bring about one symbolic change to the White House: He threw out his predecessor?s rule that suit jackets must be worn in the White House at all times.

This isn?t merely a product of a less formal management approach. Obama adviser David Axelrod explains: ?He?s from Hawaii, OK? He likes it warm. You could grow orchids in there.?

Apparently, Mr. Obama values his creature comforts more than he worries about his personal carbon footprint.

Let us take back the liberty wherewith Christ has made us free.